Thermal Reflow Engineered Cylindrical Polymer Waveguides for Optical Interconnects

Integrated polymer photonics brings low cost and high fabrication flexibility to optoelectronic industry. However, this platform needs to overcome several issues to be effective enough for practical applications. In this letter, we experimentally demonstrate a decrease of propagation losses and polarization sensitivity of polymer waveguide-based devices as a result of thermal treatment. Heating of poly(methyl methacrylate) strip optical waveguides above the glass transition temperature initiates a waveguide surface reflow due to a decrease of the polymer viscosity and surface tension energy. This results in a decrease of surface roughness and shape change from rectangular to cylindrical. Thus, scattering losses and polarization sensitivity are minimized.